Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [110]
I told Genaro Sr. that I didn’t have time to listen to them either and that perhaps these interchangeable characters and mixed-up plots were Pedro Camacho’s highly original way of telling a story.
“We aren’t paying him to be original; we’re paying him to entertain our listeners,” Genaro Sr. informed me, making it quite plain that he for his part was not a progressive-minded impresario but a thoroughgoing traditionalist. “If he keeps on with jokes like that, he’s going to make us lose our listeners, and sponsors will withdraw their commercials. You’re his friend: pass the word on to him to cut out these modernist gimmicks, or else he’s liable to end up without a job.”
I suggested that he tell him so himself: since he was the boss, the threat would carry more weight.
But Genaro Sr. shook his head, with an air of compunction that Genaro Jr. had inherited. “He won’t even let me speak to him. Success has gone to his head, and every time I try to have a word with him, he’s disrespectful.”
Genaro Sr. had gone to his cubicle to tell him, as politely as possible, that the station had been receiving phone calls, and show him the letters of complaint. Without saying a single word in reply, Pedro Camacho had taken the two letters, torn them to pieces without opening them, and tossed them in the wastebasket. He then began typing, as though there were no one present, and as Genaro Sr., on the edge of apoplexy, was leaving that hostile lair, he heard him mutter: “Let the cobbler stick to his last.”
“I can’t put up with any more insults like that; I’d have to kick him out, and that wouldn’t be realistic either,” he concluded with a weary gesture. “But you don’t have anything to lose. He’s not going to insult you—you’re more or less a writer too, aren’t you? Give us a hand, do it for the corporation, talk to him.”
I promised him I would, and in fact, to my misfortune, I went down after the twelve o’clock Panamericana newscast to invite Pedro Camacho to come have a cup of verbena-and-mint. We were leaving Radio Central when two big strapping young men blocked our path. I recognized them immediately: the barbecue cooks, two brothers with big bushy mustaches, from the Argentina Grill, a restaurant located on the same street, across from the school run by the Little Sisters of Bethlehem; dressed in white aprons and tall chef’s toques, they were the ones who prepared the rare steaks and grilled tripe that were the specialty of the restaurant.
The two of them surrounded him, looking as though they were out for trouble, and the older and fatter one said to him in a threatening tone of voice: “So we’re child-killers, are we, Camacho, you bastard? Did you think there was nobody in this country who could teach you a little respect, you bum?”
He grew more and more excited as he spoke, turning bright red and stumbling over his words. The younger brother kept nodding in agreement, and as his elder paused for a moment, choking with rage, he too put in his two cents’ worth. “And what about the lice? So you think, do you, that women where we come from eat the vermin they pull out of their kids’ hair as a special treat, you fucking son of a bitch? Do you think I’m going to let you get away with insulting my mother?”
The Bolivian scriptwriter hadn’t backed away an inch and stood there listening to them with a magisterial air, his exophthalmic eyes slowly shifting from one to the other. Then, with a characteristic little bow from the waist, mindful of a master of ceremonies, and in a very solemn tone of voice, he suddenly asked them the most civil question imaginable. “Are you by any chance Argentines?”
The fat barbecue chef, foaming at the mustache now, his face only a few inches away from Pedro Camacho’s (a confrontation that had forced him to bend way over), roared patriotically: “Yes, you